so. programming.

right.

who thought this was a good idea?

Oh yeah, me.

This week I have been super focused on catching up.

I thought I was being all brilliant by using data that already existed. Ha! Wrong!

Instead, I spent way too much time getting my head around what data I had, what I wanted to do with it, and what I needed to do to it in order to be able to do said things.

Why was this a problem you ask? Well, there are nearly 200,000 lines in the “text” csv file for one. For two, the names aren’t standardized. For three, the hymnal information I really wanted to use doesn’t have data regarding the texts included nor vice-versa. And I looked, and these text can appear in hundreds (HUNDREDS!) of hymnals. and so my brain exploded.

Then I remembered that we’re supposed to be learning methods, not necessarily solving this particular data problem. So I’ve given up on the hymnals for now and am just looking at texts and authors. I selected out the authors recorded as born between 1800 – 1809 and then pulled the texts that corresponded with them as best I could – this proved somewhat difficult because of the variety of ways the name appeared in the text file.

But the end of the story is I have a database that I can work with, and a join table that seems to be functioning. I have yet to figure out how best to harness the power of the join table, but I think I’m getting somewhere.

The current state of this work is at clio3.jeriwieringa.com. (index is viewable at the root)

First caveat: I am not doing any of the dev work here – I am just uploading for presentation. I can’t create a new user on my account (the downside to cheap virtual private servers) so I’m a bit nervous about the whole thing. I want to put this an EC2 instance, but, well, that’s another puzzle to figure out. I am cheating and getting help from my personal tech team, but he’s been a bit busy. So this is my temporary solution.

Second caveat: this is built on top of a “temp” version of the database (and one before I split up the author column in texts to create an accurate join table.) This means if things get changed, it’s ok. for the most part. i guess…

What’s working:

  • I decided to split the view pages into an author view and a text view. These can be viewed as a large list or paginated.
  • Delete does work, but I removed it … didn’t want my database to disappear.

What still needs work:

  • I am trying to figure out how to create a “show” page, where you would see an individual author information and the list of texts associated with that author. Same (but reversed) with the texts.
  • The add and edit page displays for authors, but I’m getting an error during the submit process that I’m still figuring out. This then needs to be done for texts as well. Or I need to figure out how to make my data more simple again.
  • And everything else that breaks but I don’t know about yet.

And that’s were it’s at right now.